Oscar Loves 'Aviator'

Blacks, Latinos Get 6 Lead, Support Role Nods

January 26, 2005|By John Horn and Susan King Los Angeles Times

The Aviator, an old-fashioned Hollywood epic about Howard Hughes' obsessions, romances and crippling neuroses, captured 11 nominations to take the lead for the 77th annual Academy Awards, including best picture, best actor for Leonardo DiCaprio and best director for Martin Scorsese.

Tied for the second-most nominations announced Tuesday, with seven apiece, were Finding Neverland, a story of Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie, and Million Dollar Baby, Clint Eastwood's drama about an older boxing coach and his female student. Both films were nominated for best picture, as were the Ray Charles biography Ray and the Pinot Noir-infused road movie Sideways.

Three years after Denzel Washington and Halle Berry took home the top acting trophies, the 5,808 voters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognized six performances by black and Hispanic actors in this year's lead and supporting competitions (although all were directed by white filmmakers).

Jamie Foxx, who starred as the late blind singer in Ray, was honored for best actor, and also was nominated for best supporting actor for Collateral. Don Cheadle, who played a deal-making rescuer in the midst of Hotel Rwanda's genocide, received a best actor selection while the film's Sophie Okonedo was named in the best supporting actress category. Million Dollar Baby's Morgan Freeman was nominated for supporting actor, and Catalina Sandino Moreno, a Colombian student who made her movie debut as a drug mule in Maria Full of Grace, was among the best actress nominees.

Foxx was hailed as an Oscar favorite as soon as Ray arrived in theaters, but director Taylor Hackford, who also got a nod, was considered a far less certain nominee. It had become a sore spot for Foxx, who arrived on the project after his director had worked for the better part of two decades to get the movie to the screen.

"I knew he was hurting," Foxx said of Hackford's increasingly gloomy mood before the nominations. "He worked on this for so long, took the pay cut, made everything happen. I stopped talking about it around him because I didn't want to make him feel worse."

Black performances also were recognized in the documentary feature category (for Tupac: Resurrection) and foreign language film (for South Africa's Yesterday). "It is always an inspiration when any artist can kind of transcend these boundaries, and Tupac was able to do that," said Tupac co-director Lauren Lazin.

Freeman said moviemakers haven't discriminated on racial grounds for years. "Hollywood is only interested in one color now," the actor said. "And that's green."

In addition to Foxx, DiCaprio and Cheadle, the other nominees for best actor are Eastwood for Million Dollar Baby's boxing coach and Johnny Depp playing the playwright Barrie in Finding Neverland.

"We focused on a man achieving his dreams and simultaneously spiraling down mentally," DiCaprio said of playing Hughes. "It was like finding a great piece of Shakespeare that hadn't been put into production yet."

Joining Moreno in the best actress category were Annette Bening as an aging actress in Being Julia, Hilary Swank as the scrappy female boxer in Million Dollar Baby, Imelda Staunton as an abortionist in Vera Drake, and Kate Winslet as an amnesiac lover in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Competing against Scorsese and Hackford for best director will be Alexander Payne for Sideways, Mike Leigh for Vera Drake and Eastwood, who, if he were to win, would become the oldest director winner at 74.

Taken as a group, the best picture nominees marked a shift in how Hollywood's best movies are made. Rather than being financed entirely by major studios or their specialized film divisions, three of this year's best pictures -- Ray, Million Dollar Baby and The Aviator -- were bankrolled by an array of funding sources.

In part because of their hodgepodge financing, the academy has yet to determine who will be named as official producers.